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Ah, so now he wants you to produce free content for his dying, unstable platform, after threatening you, on a whim, to shut off your free access. I see.
In response, I will be discontinuing all my projects that rely on Twitter's API, and I advise you all to do the same, rather than let him decide their fate.
And hey, if your livelihood depends on Twitter API, I get it, this sounds like good news. But your business is not saved, you just bought a bit more time. You should really start thinking about your exit strategy before he changes his mind again.
@stefan We're going to pay to keep our unreleased extension active, because it will be useful in promoting the next migration exodus. But it's hardly part of our business model. That's all shifting to the fedi, now. We mostly post content there first (or only) now.
@shoq Yeah, I'd probably do the same, begrudgingly.
@stefan There's also that small but real chance that Elmo bails out, and:
a) declares bankruptcy, or
b) takes my advice and donates the whole Twitter enterprise to a nonprofit and writes off his $20 billion personal loss
In either case, it could end up in the hands of more competent stewards, and if that happens, I'll want my personal account (and extension) to reemerge.
It's a longshot, but still a plausible outcome of this tragic farce.
@shoq Definitely. Personally, I'd love to see the social web move towards the fediverse model.
Honestly, I'd love it if Twitter just got sold and the new owner decided to follow Tumblr and Flickr and make it compatible with fediverse. I'm not a purist and I do accept that most people prefer convenience and ease of use. But the rest of us shouldn't be held hostage.
@stefan @shoq I think Musk passing Twitter off to someone else, a person on (preferably) a group who's a lot less divisive, is willing to walk back his egregious policies, maybe a non-profit in some way, is probably the best possible outcome now.
(the best outcome for Twitter, for the world it might be better for it to just die, the energy around Mastodon right now is instructive: when a huge corporation drives folk away, the public good potentially benefits)
@madargon@rodneylives @stefan @shoq So the "best" version is still the same rotting status quo with web centralization in hands of few megacorps, with ads, manipulative algorithms and promoting unhealthy dynamics for oligarchs' profits? Why the hell any site or service should last forever?! Scenario with immortal corporations treating users as products until the end of the world sounds like the most dystopian nightmare.
@madargon @rodneylives @stefan
It feels like you missed the 2nd half of his post. I think he mostly agrees with you. But there is an argument to made that 350 million users with 1.5 decades of history and fraternity there, might like a more graceful transition than "if you don't like my little fascist friends, you can just GTFO." A nonprofit owner could and probably would transition it to ActivityPub.
@madargon@is-a.cat@shoq @rodneylives @stefan Yes, it was mostly for first part.
And you are right innocent users of any service don't deserve random bans, data loss or the rest of this mess. Some kind of systemic change is needed, as you said, more non-profit orgs in web controlling communication services, interoperability - EU like talk about this but is it possible they would change anything for better?